Perl 6's flattening rules are completely revised so that hashes and arrays don't actually have to care whether they're in scalar or list context until they're bound to parameters. Nevertheless, what you're saying there still won't work. If you want to treat an array as a list of parameters where Perl 6 is expecting a scalar, you have to use an explicit unary * to tell it that's what you want.

Fractional seconds weren't supported by most versions of Unix when Perl was invented, but that has changed for the better over the years. In Perl 6 most times will be represented in floating-point seconds, so a fractional sleep should do what you expect.

Tying and magic are done entirely differently in Perl 6 (through mixins and such), though you can never get entirely away from the fact that some semantics are going to hide other semantics unless you construct a class that specifically knows about both sets of inherited or composed semantics. However, it should work more like you expect, insofar as the latest layer of semantics should hide the built-in magic, and not vice versa.

As for localtime, it was always intended to be a thin interface over C. But Perl 6 will give an OO interface to most of the list-returning functions, and you'll get at the values with methods on the returned object. So we can fix the year+1900 problem at least for the method call.

I'm not brian, but I can probably pass these on to Larry before Perl 6 comes out... :-)

Did I say we should change Perl to allow this? No. Do you understand the premises of this thread? brian was asking for what people consider oddities of Perl thinking. Now I'm sure any oddity has its reason for being odd (after all, it's there the way it is because someone put it there, and not because Larry has a piece of radioactive material next to his computer and he's just watching how the rays mutate Perl) - but that's not the point.

I expect Perl to DWIM (just like it does in many other things), and if on my system select undef, undef, undef, 2.5 waits for about 2500 milliseconds, then there's no reason to assume sleep 2.5 can't.